New gallery exhibition by Newell Harry in Albury

Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) has announced a major exhibition by internationally celebrated contemporary artist Newell Harry, marking the artist’s largest solo project to date. Titled Esperanto, this exhibition marks the first time the gallery has presented a major solo exhibition of works by a contemporary Australian artist. The exhibition will open on 28 July 2023. Newell Harry is an Australian-born artist of South African and Mauritian descent, whose work draws from an intimate web of connections across Oceania and the wider Indo-Pacific, to South Africa’s Western Cape Province where his extended family continue to reside. Through an ongoing syncretic process of collecting, trading and documenting, Harry examines the cultural agitation brought about by the movement of people, objects and knowledge as a result of colonial expansion, migration and globalisation. Esperanto presents the breadth of Newell Harry’s practice, woven together in a complex network of ideas and narratives. The exhibition recognises pivotal moments in Australian, South African and Indo-Pacific histories of the 60s and 70s, such as the end of the White Australia Policy, the 1967 referendum, anti-apartheid rugby protests, environmental and anti-nuclear testing movements, as well as themes of South African pop culture, ideas of trade, gift giving, family stories of migration and care, and an open engagement with notions of museological display and value. The exhibition features a major new commission, a large-scale photographic series set in Sydney’s Callan Park that speaks to central ideas in the artist’s practice, such as the complexity of identity, championing of the ‘other’ via the anti-narrative, and… Read More